‘Chidiya’ Movie Review: A Sweet And Self-Contained Film About Lost Childhoods

Director: Mehran Amrohi
Writer: Mehran Amrohi, Amitabh Varma
Cast: Svar Kamble, Ayush Pathak, Amruta Subhash, Vinay Pathak, Hetal Gada, Inaamulhaq
Language: Hindi

When you hear that a film made ten years ago is getting a long-delayed release, preconceived notions take over. The same set of thoughts emerge: it’ll be dated, it’ll have the small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome, it’ll be an indie asking for sympathy, it’ll be have intentions than craft. It can be worse when it’s a children’s film — you almost expect it to revolve around a cycle or an unattainable toy or the pursuit of little-things happiness with sad-violin music. Chidiya, too, revolves around two brothers from a Mumbai chawl — 9-year-old Shanu (Svar Kamble) and 5-year-old Bua (Ayush Pathak) — who want to play a game whose name they don’t know. It involves a shuttlecock and two rackets. They spend days trying to hustle together a net, some space, and most of all, some time. Their struggle features a few quirky characters from the neighbourhood. See what I mean?

But Chidiya is a rare indie that commits to its simplicity. It’s sweet, poignant, curious, not (too) performative, and despite the occasional sad-music and longing-stares melodrama, it reveals the invisible trials of big-city survival that stories are often too busy to explore. Badminton is the last thing on the mind of their widowed mother, Vaishnavi (Amruta Subhash). She needs money to run a household that has just lost its primary breadwinner; she can’t even afford the service bills of the autorickshaw her husband owned. She requests her older brother Bali (Vinay Pathak) — a spot boy for a film production company — to get her underaged sons some work on the set. In other words, their childhood is on the brink of being cut short by the demands of premature adulthood. The game starts to signify the dying embers of innocence in them. Somehow, it stays beyond their reach. The closer they inch to that elusive evening of badminton and fun, the further their ‘job’ pulls them away.

The texture and setting make Chidiya very watchable. The vignettes of chawl life feel true — like a tired-looking Bali boasting about being Amitabh Bachchan’s preferred helper at every function; the elders treating every kid as a nuisance; or the boys spying on badminton-playing residents of the adjoining colony at night. The film nicely writes its link to film-making into the plot; director and co-writer Mehran Amrohi is a distant relative of Pakeezah (1972) director and Kamalistan Studio founder Kamal Amrohi. Bali’s profession as a veteran spot boy — and the beginning of the boys’ careers in his footsteps — is shaped by this connection. The scenes on a movie set look lived-in and far from romanticised.

In the modest world of Chidiya, it’s another job for working-class aspirants. The brothers’ first shooting experience involves an interaction with a Marathi celebrity (Shreyas Talpade, playing himself); you’d expect this to be the moment when one of them decides to love the movies and aspire to be a great storyteller/actor. But instead of being starstruck, they only notice the ‘prop’ on his table: a shuttlecock. That’s how they get obsessed with the game. Cinema and art can wait. It’s a neat way of showing that children’s dreams are often as old as their age; it’s adults that reduce them to wide-eyed creatures with adult-shaped ambitions.

I like the little touches in characterisation. Bali’s wife is a regular homemaker, but she resents sister-in-law Vaishnavi for depending on Bali so much. But this tension between the two women rarely influences the bigger picture; there’s no permanent conflict or showdown, it’s just the insecurities of a family who live next door to each other. Vaishnavi herself is an anxious mother, and she keeps chastising and scolding her sons, but at some level she’s convincing herself that they’re troublemakers so that her guilt of putting them to work so early in life is assuaged. Their mischief is average — like nicking an ice-cream from a schoolgirl, blowing the fuse of the chawl, or stealing a tiny ganpati idol from the rickshaw — but Vaishnavi is torn between protecting them and inflating their naugitiness. She knows it’s unfair, but enforcing a sense of responsibility upon them becomes her duty.

As a result, a routinely upbeat scene of Shanu buying a popsicle and giving it to the girl he once snatched it from acquires a sense of sadness in this context — he’s grown-up and has morals earlier than he should. He’s lost the agency to learn and unlearn on his own terms. When the kids wear shirts for the first time, they look like they’re grieving the youth that’s slipping away. There is no turning back. Badminton becomes the physical manifestation of retaining that final shred of carefreeness: of communicating with each other with the wild swing of a racket rather than the busy hustle of wages. The film maintains that there’s nothing inspirational about their grit; it’s a compulsion, not a choice.

Another bonus of watching ‘old’ movies releasing late is the time-machine-like effect it has on our relationship with performers. The nostalgia is an unintended consequence. You can tell that the great Amruta Subhash is in her Killa (2015) phase, Vinay Pathak (with a lilting Maharashtrian twang) is in his Gour Hari Dastaan (2015) phase, Inaamulhaq is in his post-Filmistaan (2014) phase, Hetal Gada is still a child artiste, Brijendra Kala is still everywhere, and even D. Santosh (Khakee, The Legend of Bhagat Singh, Rocket Singh) — one of my favourite character actors from the 2000s and early 2010s — is still around. I’ll refrain from the good-old-days tone, but it’s satisfying to recognise the language of minor-key Hindi cinema from a decade ago.

What I like the most is the film’s ability to be practical about a hopeful anti-fairytale. It doesn’t package false promises and happily ever afters for the sake of fiction. For better or worse, being spot-boys on a set full of colourful people is the kids’ destiny — it isn’t supposed to change. There is no Aamir Khan-coded saviour or social-commentary climax. Any joys of adolescence that they manage to locate from hereon is within the confines of this future — like an empty badminton court at a school on an outdoor shoot, or a short holiday between schedules. It’s a long-term situation, but for a few fleeting moments, they can remember what it’s like to be children again. For those few moments, their mother can hear them laugh and cry and groan about winning and losing. After all, is there anything more life-affirming than a feel-good tragedy?